Attention tests online
Attention is the part of thinking that decides what gets through — and keeps deciding it while everything else competes for the same room. The tests below are free, run entirely in your browser with no account, and this page says what each one measures before you take it.
What attention is
Attention is not one ability. Researchers usually separate at least three jobs it does: picking one thing out while ignoring everything else on the screen, holding a boring task going long after it stopped being interesting, and switching cleanly between two tasks instead of dragging the first one along. A short test touches one of those, not all three — which is why two attention tests can disagree about you and both be right.
It is also not a fixed quantity you were issued at birth. How well you attend this afternoon depends on how you slept, what you drank, how loud the room is and how much you care about the task. That is not a flaw in the measurement; it is most of what the measurement is made of, and it is why a single run tells you about an afternoon rather than about you.
And attention is not intelligence. They are different things a test can easily confuse: a person can concentrate beautifully and reason poorly, or reason well and lose the thread every ninety seconds. Nothing on this page produces a score about how smart anyone is, and nothing here is a diagnosis.
What these tests are not
- Not an attention span test
- None of the tests here measures how long your attention lasts. What they measure is narrower and shorter: what it costs to hold off an automatic answer, and how quickly you find things in a cluttered field, sometimes with a switch between two sequences laid over that search. Staying with something dull for a long stretch is a different job, sustained attention, and none of these tasks runs long enough to show it. If that is the question you arrived with, the FAQ below says what would answer it.
- Not an IQ test
- No test here is an IQ test and none of them produces an IQ score. They measure how long one specific task took you — an interval, in milliseconds or seconds — and that number describes the run, not your general ability.
- Not a diagnosis
- Attention tasks do appear in clinical assessment, but never alone: they sit inside a battery, alongside a history and an interview, and are read by someone qualified. A browser test cannot tell you whether you have ADHD, and anything online that offers to is selling something. If your concentration genuinely worries you, that is a conversation for a clinician.
- Not a percentile
- We publish no norms, so there is no population figure to place you in and none is shown. Your result is yours: compare it with your own earlier runs, on the same device, and ignore anybody else’s number.
How attention is measured
Two families of task have carried most of the work for the last century. One puts two automatic responses in conflict and times the override; the other fills a field with things and times the search — and a task can lay one of them over the other. Every test here comes out of that history.
- 1886
Words beat colors
James McKeen Cattell reports that people read a printed word noticeably faster than they can name a color they are shown. Nobody yet puts the two in conflict — but the size of that difference is what makes the conflict worth staging.
- 1935
Stroop makes them fight
John Ridley Stroop publishes Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. When the word and the ink disagree, naming the ink takes far longer — and the extra time is a direct measurement of what it costs to hold off the automatic answer. It is still one of psychology’s most reproduced findings.
- 1950s
Schulte times the search instead
The Schulte table is commonly credited to Walter Schulte, a German psychiatrist, as a bedside way to watch attention hold up — or fall apart — over a task with no thinking in it at all. Every cell is trivial; only finding it is hard, and the clock does the rest.
- Today
Old tasks, new hardware
Both formats survived the move from cards to screens, which is why you can take them here. What did not survive is comparability: a browser version on your phone runs on different timing from a lab machine, so its milliseconds sit on their own scale and only compare to themselves.
Free attention tests you can take here
Four attention tests are published so far — Stroop Test, Schulte Table, Flanker Test and Trail Making Test. Each is free, runs online in this browser, and shows your own result the moment you finish.
Live figures from everyone’s runs: Average Stroop effect
Each one runs in your browser. Three of them upload nothing at all — your result is shown to you and then gone when you close the tab. The Stroop test is the exception: when a run there ends it is sent to us, anonymously, so that the chart of everyone's runs can exist.
How to read your result
Each test here hands you an interval, and an interval is easy to over-read. Four things worth knowing before you decide what yours means.
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The comparison that works
Your run against your own earlier runs, on the same device, at a similar time of day. It is the only comparison any of these tests can support honestly — and it happens to be the one that answers the question people actually have.
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Your equipment is in the number
Touchscreen or mouse, display latency, whatever else the browser is doing — all of it lands in the milliseconds. Switching devices between runs changes the result without changing your attention at all.
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One run is noisy
These take a minute or two. Long enough to feel the effect and get a rough figure; not long enough for a stable measurement — research versions run several times as many trials, for exactly this reason.
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Accuracy comes first
A fast run full of wrong answers is not a good result, it is a different task. Read the errors before the time: only a time earned at full accuracy means anything at all.
Attention in the NEURA app
NEURA on iPhone works this domain on purpose rather than by accident. Two of the 19 games are built for it, four more touch it while measuring something else, and the daily session carries one task format that lands there.
- Games built for it
- Schulte Table
- Stroop
- Games that also work it
- Symbol Coding
- N-Back
- Word Recall
- Word Sweep
- Daily-session tasks
- Symbol search
A daily session is 20 tasks, about five minutes, and every answer is scored into the domain its task belongs to. Those domain results roll up into one number, which opens once you have completed three daily sessions — see Focus Index for what that number is and what it is not. A game’s primary domain takes the full weight of its result and the domains it also touches take a share. The exact weighting is not published, because the useful reading is the direction your number moves over weeks — not the arithmetic that made it.
Questions about attention
What is an attention test?
An attention test is a short timed task built so that the only thing between you and the right answer is staying focused. The two classic shapes are conflict tasks, where an automatic response has to be held off (the Stroop test is the famous one), and search tasks, where a target has to be found in a field of distractors (the Schulte table is the plainest). Both kinds report an interval — how long the task took you — rather than a score out of anything.
Which attention test should I take first?
Start with the Stroop Test if you want to feel the effect: the conflict between the word and the ink is obvious from the first trial, and the result has an intuitive meaning — what the conflicting words cost you in milliseconds. Take the Flanker Test for the same conflict with no reading in it — five arrows, answer the middle one — which is why those two are worth taking one after the other: they report the same number and only one of them asks you to read. Take the Schulte Table if you would rather measure plain visual search: find 1 to 25 in order on a scrambled grid, against the clock, with nothing to think about. Leave the Trail Making Test for last and give it a couple of minutes: it runs two searches instead of one, and the number it hands you is the difference between them.
How do I test my attention span?
Not on this page, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of effort. A span-of-attention measure has to run long enough for drifting to happen and is scored on the DECLINE — how much slower and less accurate you get late in the task compared with early in it. That is why the instruments built for it go on for tens of minutes and are dull on purpose. The tests here last a minute or two and report one figure for the whole run, so there is no later to compare with an earlier: the number they produce cannot decline, and a page that sold it to you as your attention span would be inventing the measurement.
Can an attention test tell me if I have ADHD?
No. ADHD is diagnosed by a qualified clinician from a history, an interview and standardized instruments used together — never from one timed task, and never from a web page. A slow run here means you had a slow run here. If your concentration genuinely worries you, take that to a clinician rather than to a browser test.
Can attention be trained?
You reliably get better at the attention task you practice: Stroop runs get faster, Schulte tables get quicker, and that improvement is real. Whether it carries over into everyday concentration is genuinely debated among researchers, and the evidence for broad transfer is thin. We would rather say that than sell you a promise — NEURA is built to be a regular, measured habit, not a guaranteed upgrade.
Do I need an account to take these tests?
No. The attention tests on this page run in your browser, need no signup and upload nothing. An account only comes into it if you install the app, where results are kept so that a trend can exist at all.
One run is a snapshot. The trend is the point.
A browser test measures one afternoon. NEURA on iPhone runs this kind of task every day, adapts it to you, and turns the runs into a Focus Index you can watch move over weeks. Your first session is free.
